Post 134  6/16/2024

Synchrony :
Chaos, Time & Order

This book is about the phenomenon of Spontaneous Order, such as Synchrony¹ : stable interrelationships over time. Strogatz says, “the laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy”. . . . .

Post 121 12/12/2021

Is Free Will
Fake Agency?

 An article in Skeptic magazine [v26, no 1 2021] raised several thorny scientific & philosophical issues, including the ontological status of Consciousness and Free Will1. The author proposes to show why such immaterial non-things are not “illusions” or “delusions” as some have concluded after careful reasoning. . . . . .

Post 122  12/20/2021

FREE WILL

 And other popular               delusions    
The author begins his introduction by asserting that “the overarching problem is free will”. His concern is not so much with the meaning of “will”, but with “what it means to be free”. Before presenting his own solution to the problem though, he gives us a lot of religious and philosophical background. . . .

Post 123  04/11/2022

What is Information?  

Claude Shannon labeled the basic element of computer data as "Information". That word had long been associated with various aspects of ideas in the human mind : communication, knowledge, reference, meaning, truth, etc. But his quantified definition of the term focused, not on any particular semantic content,  . . . .

Post 143 05/10/2025

Big Bang as Cosmic Creation

 If, instead of the original something-from-nothing model, the cosmological Big Bang explosion metaphor is instead portrayed as a Cosmic Egg¹, or Seed, we are then faced with the old Chicken-or-Egg conundrum, con-cerning which is essential or funda-mental : no egg ; no chicken ; no chicken : no egg. In ancient myths the provenance of the egg was simply . .

Post 115 03/09/2021

Can I.I.T. Explain Consciousness

In his Scientific American magazine article, science writer John Horgan questions an “am-bitious” new theory to explain how human Consciousness evolved from dumb matter, like atoms, to smart stuff. Like brains. Or as he put it, “how does stuff become conscious?” His first introduction to the theory made him skeptical. . . .

Post 126  08/16/2022

Is Consciousness
Everywhere?

Prominent neuroscientist, Kristof Koch, has become an advocate for the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi. They now work together to fill any gaps in the theory that consciousness emerges naturally when information processing systems reach a minimal state of integration (wholeness). Tononi measures the degree of unification in units of phi . . .

Post 141  02/05/2025

Evolutionary Process and Cosmic Reality

In the early days of my amateur retirement venture into the academic discipline of Philosophy ─ study of knowledge, reality, and existence ─ I got in way over my head trying to read A. N. White-head's abstruse & enigmatic explication of Process and Reality. . . . .

Post 138  10/07/2024

Holism and

Evolution

General Jan C. Smuts was the George Washington (military leader), the Thomas Jefferson (philosopher), and the Benjamin Franklin (scientist) of his nascent nation, South Africa. Like the United States, it was an exploit-ed European colony in a less developed land. And, like Washington, he fought against the colonial power . . . .

Post 145 08/08/2025

Panpsychism
       vs
Enformationism

In Post 130, I discussed the philosophical distinction between the ancient & modern notions of Consciousness as a fundamental force in the world, and my own hypothesis of Causation as more elementary than Mind. Hence, what we know as Mental phenomena — thoughts, per-cepts, concepts, feelings, etc — did not exist in the physical . . .

Post 136 8/5/2024

Holism and
Creative
Evolution

 Before he gets into the events that led to the evolutionary emergence of living organisms. Bergson begins with the entity we know best : the Self. “The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own”. Then he discusses Evolution : . .

Post 150 02/01/2026

Metaphysics
of Causation

David Hume inquired into what it means for one event or thing (the Cause ; Action) to produce another similar instance in sequence (the Effect ; Reaction). And he concluded that Causation — logical relation between Cause & Effect — is merely a consistent pattern where one event follows another . . . .

Post 137  9/13/2024

Active Information,

Meaning & Form
Quantum physicist David Peat worked with, and was influenced by both Bohm and Roger Pen-rose, who also postulated some unorthodox theories of physics and metaphysics. I borrowed the name of his article¹ for this blog post. There, he noted that “Towards the end of the 1980s David Bohm introduced the notion of Active Information into his Ontological . . . .

Post 124 08/23/2020

Cause  of
Existence   

Modern philosophers tend to distrust Intuition¹, as a hasty & emotional, instead of methodical & rational way of knowing. But Intuition is fundamental, instinct-ive, and personal, hence it makes the strongest subjective case for belief. Only after those intuitive embryos-of-thought are established can the rational . . .

               Post 139 01/20/2024

              Cosmology &             Evolution  

In his 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis, historian & geo-physicist Stephen Meyer makes a detailed case (science-based and non-scriptural) for Intelligent Design (ID) in evolution as opposed to Dumb Accidents (DA)¹. He's “comfort-able with the standard evo-lutionary story, but with a theistic spin”. . . . .

             Post 140  01/12/2025

          Wholeism &
          Holism    

This post is my attempt to reconcile David Bohm’s quantum physics explanation of Wholeness (entanglement)  with Jan Smuts’ notion of Holism (organisms) in Evolution. I’m much more familiar with the latter than the former. But they seem to be talking about the same kinds of mysterious forces & processes in Nature. . . . .

              Post 140  01/12/2025

           Wholeness &
           Holism    

This post is my attempt to reconcile David Bohm’s quantum physics explanation of Wholeness (entanglement)  with Jan Smuts’ notion of Holism (organisms) in Evolution. I’m much more famil-iar with the latter than the former. But they seem to be talking about the same kinds of mysterious forces & processes in Nature. . . .     

Post 127  10/18/2022

Potential vs Actual

Aristotle's differentiation be-tween Potential & Actual¹, as two different ways to exist, may help you to understand the same distinction in Physics. You could say that Potential is uni-versal and non-local, while Actual is specific and local. For example, a AA battery is said to have the Potential for 1.5 volt-amps of current, even when no current (kinetic energy) is flowing.

Post 142  02/20/2025

The Point of
Process Philosophy

I can't say with any authority, what Whitehead's "point" was. But my takeaway is that he was inspired by the counterintuitive-yet-provable "facts" of the New Physics of the 20th century ─ that contrasted with 17th century Classical Physics ─ to return the distracted philosophical focus . . . . .

Post 144  08/08/2025

Light is Enformy

On the Universe Today website, astrophysicist Paul Sutter’s article : Is Anything Absolute With Relativity¹, described how the speed of light became a universal constant for astrophysics. . . Instead, they agreed that something similar to Newton’s invisible intangible mathematical cosmic grid . . . .

Post 147 11/25/2025

Right Stuff for
Consciousness

The ancient philosophy of Materialism, as described by Lucretius, presumed that the world was exclusively and simply Material ─ described as “atoms moving in the void”. Yet this fundamental hypothesis included three components : a> tangible substance (matter), b> causal change (motion), and c>

Post 146 10/27/2025

Cosmos Created Mind

Background : I recently finished Dan Brown's new novel, Secret of Secrets, and enjoyed the intellectual thrill ride com-pletely. Spoiler Alert! : If you are not familiar with the book, I'll reveal the "secret" hidden in plain insight : human conscious-ness, and its alter ego The Mind, is not generated by the brain, but is instead a signal from out

Post 148 11/27/2024

Emergent Evolution

The improbable appearance of Life and Mind from inorganic processes over the past 13.8 billion years is one of the most astonishing facts of nature. This gradual development of higher-order phenomena/qualia from lower-level processes has puzzled scientists and philoso-phers for centuries.  . . . . . .

                  Post 149  12/19/2025

             BothAnd vs

             Either-Or

I coined the term BothAnd for my thesis and blog in order to label my personal alternative to the binary Either/Or mindset of some perfectionists, who find the uncertainties, complexities & contradictions of the world confusing and disappointing. My philosophy is comparable to the holistic principle of complement-